


Nothing but Radiance

by Fallwater023



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alpha/Omega, Alternate Universe, Character Study, Childhood Memories, Circus, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Gender Issues, Gender Roles, Genderqueer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-15
Updated: 2014-08-15
Packaged: 2018-02-13 06:03:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2139807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fallwater023/pseuds/Fallwater023
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"[Steve] grinned. 'The Doc fixed her too.'" </p><p>A glimpse into Peggy Carter's childhood, as a girl born to become an alpha in an A/B/O world where women are not alphas.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nothing but Radiance

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Changeling](https://archiveofourown.org/works/770875) by [Cluegirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cluegirl/pseuds/Cluegirl). 



> Disclaimer. You know this, guys. Nothing is mine but the words. Not even the title - you can't trademark titles. So I own even less than I think I do. Woohoo. 
> 
> Missing scene from Cluegirl's excellent story Changeling, which handles the A/B/O genre and its inherent issues quite nicely. I wanted to flesh out the idea that Erskine "fixed" Peggy by giving her a version of the serum to make her an alpha.

In deinem Reichtum scheinst du wie Kleidung um Kleidung  
Um einen Leib aus nicht als Glanz  
\---  
In your richness you shine, garment on garment  
on a body of nothing but radiance  
-Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

 

It began, as many things begin, in childhood. 

Little Margaret Jane Carter had a happy, comfortable life in a small village just outside Liverpool. It was chilly in the winter, and even in summer the stiff sea breeze never let heat settle into people’s bones, but it was home. She grew up rosy-nosed, bundled in her mum’s horrible knitted jumpers, and kept herself warm by barreling around the countryside with a pack of the other village children. The bigger ones called her Margie when they teased her and Maggie when they were in a mood to be nice, and the little ones called her Mags all the time, and her cousins called her Meggie when they came to visit from Sheffield, and her parents called her Peggy. Except when she was in trouble, which happened a lot. 

Life in the village was sweet and slow - it was the sort of frustrating place where a big-hearted young girl had to make her own adventures happen. So when the circus came to town it was a golden opportunity. For once, adventure would come to her like it came to the heroes in all her bedtime stories, and she would be ready. Loins girded, feet booted, armed with a sack lunch and a nickel for carnival games, Peggy set out. 

It was a weird sort of adventure, she reflected as she chewed her sandwich, having gone up a tree for lunch. It was very noisy and bright, and everybody seemed in a big hurry to be somewhere else except the circus people. The circus had come on an early spring day when the sky was clear blue and the sun beat down on the freezing world. Everything was bright and cold, so it was hard to look in any one direction for very long. Not much of an adventure now, she decided, but definitely adventure material. 

“Hey, hey! Lay-dees an’ gennelmen, children of all ay-ges, come see the greatest show in the countryyyyy!” 

Very promising. Peggy shinned down the tree and marched up to the doorman, who took her gravely offered nickel with a wide grin and a “Step right up, little lady!” and she stepped right up into a cave built for adventure. 

The sudden darkness blinded her, but she eventually made out the light of flickering stage lamps - light the color of magic. The crowd slowly trickled in, and she slipped into a seat right up by the ringside. It was a little circus, only one ring, but the coziness almost made it more special - she shrugged off her jumper as the seats around her filled with neighbors. 

The show passed in a dazzle of sequins and searchlights. The thunder of the drums wound Peggy’s heartbeat up and up and just when she could hardly breathe, all the stage lamps were doused for the next act. A woman melted out of the darkness into the pool of sun beaming down from the tent’s sky-hole.

She wasn’t like the other showgirls, with their short skirts and high heels and perfect pincurls. Her hair was long and glossy and dark, a single sweep of blue-black over her pale shoulder, drawn up high with a white ribbon. Everything else about her was dark - her sweeping cloak, her boots, her gloves, her huge long-lashed eyes. She was a shadow, tall and lean, and Peggy barely heard the ringmaster’s booming voice as he began the introductory patter. She tuned in to hear him say “Feast your senses on the one, the only...Lay-deeee Death!”

The woman threw aside her cloak, and she was wearing a man’s costume, from centuries ago, trousers and tunic black as night. Two belts laden with silver throwing blades crossed her chest, and she carried a sword on her hip. But it wasn’t the weapons or the name that made the audience recoil. 

Peggy had never seen a woman look so - intent, so - intense. So deadly. Later that night, she tried to explain to her mother that it was something in her shoulders, in the cat-quietness of her steps as she paced around the ring and the way she turned her head like a hawk - holding gaze until her whole body turned, and then snapping her head to fix the next victim with those eyes. She fixed on Peggy, just once, and her eyes were like falling into a well. 

Many years later, she would realize that she was reacting not just to the body language, but to the unmistakable scent of Ace on the woman. A scent neither she nor anyone in the village, nor indeed anyone in the world had ever paired with a female face. The ringmaster’s patter billed her as a curiosity of nature, found in and stolen from a convent outside St. Petersburg by a master of blades to be his apprentice. Now, as Lady Death, she traveled the world as a knife in the dark - a nightmare to make empires bow and keep peace by the blade of her sword. 

The woman carried on with her show, throwing the blades in fancy flashing patterns through the air, nailing targets. The ringmaster asked a young woman by the ringside to throw her hanky in the air, and Lady Death pinned it with three knives against the nearest bull’s-eye target, her face impassive. 

Then she drew the sword at her side with a shing, and the ringmaster backed away with a clown’s oh no face, holding up his hands. She quirked her head, gave a half-grin, pretended to chase him out of the ring with a flash of flat-bladed strikes and a great shove with her boot. With the stage to herself, the woman finally seemed to come alive - she swung the great sword singlehanded in figure eights as she stalked to the center and sank to one knee, driving the point of her blade into the dust of the ring. 

Soft, a single drum began to beat. One, two, three, four, and the woman was up and dancing - dancing was the only word for it, but Peggy had never seen anything like this at the church dances on Easter Sunday. She was alone, her only partner the shining silver blade, but she danced as though it was a person too. More drums joined the first as she began to dip and leap in her dance, weaving the blade around her in a net of light. The beat grew complicated, but the woman never lost her footing or her place, at times lunging so near the crowd that Peggy could feel the sing of the swordwind over her face. Other times she melted back into shadow, the only light in the ring her sword and her face hanging like the moon. Faster, faster the beat spiraled and she was spiraling too, now drawing up onto one foot and pivoting, now sweeping low with her leg, the sword following and leading her and four straight beats on every drum in the house and she dropped. 

Every soul in the audience held their breath as the swordwoman rolled, sprang to her feet, swung her sword up over her head with both hands and screamed. It was a scream like an eagle, triumphant, high, wild, soaring out over the booming echo of the drums. Peggy was so entranced she didn’t even jump, though everyone around her twitched like they’d been poked in the side. The woman’s sword drew a slithering butterfly shape in the air and she sheathed the beam of silver light like an usher closing the doors for church. 

She quirked her head arrogantly, and the silent house roared with applause. Peggy jumped to her feet on the bench, bouncing as she clapped, and around her others started to rise too. Their applause was like thunder answering the drums of her dance, and the ringmaster joined her onstage. His lurid red coat felt like a punch in the face after the pure darkness and light of the woman’s dance, and Peggy narrowed her eyes. 

He boomed out “Lay-dees an’ gennelmen, let’s give it up - for Lay-deeeeee DEATH!” and swung his arm in her direction, but unlike every other performer, Lady Death didn’t sweep out a bow or a simpering curtsy. She gave her head that same arrogant quirk, hands planted on hips, then lifted one arm over her head in a snake-fast snap and lowered it to acknowledge the drummers. They stood, nodded at her, waved to the audience. Then she quirked her head again, planted her acknowledging hand on her hip, and threw the other arm up in the air, gloved fist clenched. The crowd applauded as though she had given a first-class showgirl curtsy - better, as though she were a man, a swordsman who had done amazing things and then swept a humble bow to the ordinary folk of the working day. When Lady Death turned her back and marched out of the ring, head up, striding so fast the ringmaster bumbled to keep up, every man in the house was on his feet clapping for her. 

For weeks after, little Peggy Carter picked up every stick in the village that could reasonably pass for a sword, practicing butterfly-shaped swings and mostly knocking herself in the ribs and forehead a lot. She tried to throw smaller sticks, but it wasn’t as satisfying when her ‘throwing knives’ didn’t stick where she threw them, so she stuck to skipping rocks across the miller’s pond in increasingly ridiculous numbers. She never did outgrow the habit of flinging her coat off in a dramatic sweep, though her mother did train her into ending that sequence with the coat on the hook rather than slung over the nearest flat surface. Her teacher at the village school was very pleased with her posture, but worried a little over her disposition. 

For months after, little Margaret Carter acquired a new adjective - bossy, her neighbors and friends and family concluded, shaking their heads with a grin behind her back as she swept off imperiously. The biddies of the village agreed, with the solemnity of a judge pronouncing sentence, that little Margaret Carter had a head full of notions. This could be dangerous in a grown woman, but in a child could be accepted as quite cute. With all the dignity in her three and a half feet, she conducted herself like the Queen around adults. Well, that wasn’t the right comparison - she still pelted around with all the other little terrors, but around adults she wasn’t fussy, nor did she stand on ceremony. She was very still and very quiet and very dignified, and when an adult paid her a compliment on her good manners, she didn’t beam or duck her head shyly. 

For years after, Margaret Jane Carter forgot the meaning of the word shy. Little girls were shy. Deuces and Oughts were shy. Aces were solemn, strong and silent, confident. And though she’d been to school like everyone else in the village and knew that girls were never Aces - how would that even work, if she couldn’t sire children? - Margaret Jane Carter knew in her heart of hearts that she was an Ace to the bone. 

This certainty carried her - through the dismissal of the doctor on pronouncing her a Deuce, through the sighing disappointment of her mother when she turned down the only marriage proposal she was likely to get, through the declaration of war and through her first and fifth and seventh and twelfth steps into the Army recruiting office to demand a position where she could actually do some bloody good to the actual Army. And then she met Dr. Abraham Erskine, and he gave her a choice that felt like a darkened stage. Ready for her to step out into the light. 

Within an hour of the show’s end, when Peggy Carter was striding home with a heart full of dreams and a head full of notions, she had mastered that arrogant quirk of the head. In all her days and ways, it never let her down. 

And she never curtsied again.

**Author's Note:**

> My (possibly mistaken) impression from the dialogue surrounding the summary quote is that the Changeling 'verse is standard issue A/B/O with the twist that women aren't alphas. Or, at the very least, that it's stunningly rare. I think this is a cool notion. 
> 
> Okay, I know that real-world gender dysphoria/transgender stuff doesn't really work this way. The idea of a 'triggering event' or trauma in one's early childhood leading to a deviation from cisgender-straight norms is actually hugely inaccurate and has been used to great harmful effect in 'orientation therapy' programs. I'm writing in an alpha/beta/omega universe. Young Peggy Carter in this universe doesn't feel that she is a man of any secondary designation, she identifies as a female alpha - physically feminine-typical, but with alpha-distinctive secondary sociosexual characteristics such as pheromone/scent markers, which manifest during puberty. Holy cow I need to stop writing. Go read Cluegirl's fic, it's awesome and explains this universe through osmosis so much better than I can in an End Note. 
> 
> This fic also barely skims over the surface of gender equality issues in both the real-life and the alternate-A/B/O-universe versions of WWII-era Britain. This is mostly because I'm writing from the perspective of a young girl (seven to nine-ish) who has only a tangential impression of how these forces influence her world. 
> 
> That said, I am not a Peggy Carter fan, but I saw the line in Cluegirl's fic and this thing wrote itself in an evening. So I guess my first AO3 fic is going to be Carter-centric. Woohoo. Thanks for reading.


End file.
